Interview With The Pirate Fairy Producer and Director

While in Los Angeles, we watched Disney’s The Pirate Fairy before sitting down with Director Peggy Holmes and Producer Jenni Magee-Cook for an exclusive question and answer session.

Through the interview, you could easily pick up on both Peggy and Jenni’s love and admiration for the film, which will be on DVD April 1.

This is an amazing movie with an amazing cast. How did the casting go about?

Peggy Holmes: Well the Fairies Franchise series, our main girls Tinker Bell, Silvermist, Rosetta, Iridessa, Fawn and Vidia have all been cast since the beginning. We have Jason Henkel here who’s our casting director. And he’s fantastic. And then in this particular case, the cast we added which was Christina Hendricks and Tom Hiddleston. We worked with Jason, we talked about sort of what the characters were like. And then he brings a list to us and in this case they are our top picks for each character, which was incredible.

Jenni Magee-Cook: I mean we really wanted that character to come- there were a couple of things. We really-really wanted you to like her. And we wanted to find a character that was likeable but yet you could understand made a big mistake, and goes away. But also had to be powerful, I mean, she’s a seven inch fairy fighting pirates. So she’s got to be vulnerable and sweet out front. But then she’s got to be tough when she’s a pirate, so it took a really big range of acting and Christina Hendricks is amazing. And we all knew her from Mad Men and we knew she could have that sharp tone- tough wit, but she has such a sensitive soft side to her also. And she has such a passion for this and really excited by coming in and doing a fairy. She’s a huge Disney fanatic, so I remember we showed her around the building and we were in the story room showing her art and she just was totally in the story about how it dawned on her. She was going to be a fairy.

Peggy Holmes: So then Tom Hiddleston was like well okay, first choice yes, he did it, which was just amazing! And one of the great things about Tom is first of all he’s a triple threat right? He can sing dance and act, which is amazing.

…And that’s what Tom understood was how to then get a bigger than life character, a bigger than life performance that was believable for today’s audience. And Tom got that right off the bat. And had so much fun giving us little glimpses of aha- like the big laughs and just giving us little glimpses, ’cause he’s only twenty years old. You know, our thought was, you know, he’s like twenty two, something like that. Our thought was that, that basically Hook is not as bitter, and evil as he is in Peter Pan yet. Because he hasn’t had all the failures. But you can see he’s going to start to have a lot of failures and a lot of things that go wrong for him. And he’s got big ideas that just don’t work out. You know, so Tom really had a handle on kind of how to make this character super charming and loyal and, you know, very unassuming. And then make that flip, which was great.

With all the fairies, will there be spin-offs?Jenni Magee-Cook:You know we don’t have anything that we can talk about, because it, it’s a director driven studio. So what we really do here is when the directors have a story they want to tell, that’s what they bring to the table and they decide to tell that story. And they talk about it with our teams.

Peggy Holmes: But we are in production on the next fairies film, yeah, we are in production.

I love the way the film is for boys and girls, the sequel was more for both?Jenni Magee-Cook: Yeah it’s doing really well with boys, I mean, it, in general boys don’t tend to always be the market we have for this audience. But every time we screen we, we’ve brought boys in for our general audience screenings. And I have boys and my boy is almost thirteen and he said I’m not just kissing up to you, mom. I actually like your movie. (Laughing) It’s almost like as if he said he loves me in public.

Why didn’t the movie run in theaters?Peggy Holmes:Well internationally we’re in forty-two markets. Internationally in theaters. And then we just make our movie and the Walt Disney Company, (decides where it will go). I mean, we’re at the El Capitan right now, running at the El Cap is awesome. But, you know, we just our part is to make the movie…

Jenni Magee-Cook: The powers that be- be!

Disney’s The Pirate Fairy will be out on Blu-ray and DVD April 1st. My children have watched it four times in the last three days! We love it!